Science, sustainability and the human prospect

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In this essay, Peter H. Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden describes the fundamental role that science has to play in future global sustainability.

He examines the specific contributions that science and engineering can make to the development of a sustainable society, highlighting energy as a key example. Science education is also important, he says, with scientific understanding no longer only desirable but an imperative for building truly representative democracies.

New ways of providing for a society that has outstripped the limits of global sustainability must be found, he says. This will require an integrated multidimensional approach — it is now time to decide whether the difficult challenges of the past year will jolt us into finding and accepting them.